Consuming Pethood: Pets as Family

Eddie Williams poses before the mobile billboard being driven around Indianapolis in search of Williams’ poodle Boomer (image from WTHR)

A mobile billboard is rolling around Indianapolis Indiana until April 20th pleading for help finding Boomer, a poodle thieved from the car of his owner Eddie Williams. Williams purchased the billboard to circulate through the city for five days offering a $1500 reward for the return of Boomer, no questions asked. The billboard rental cost $1950, in addition to the cost of hiring a private investigator to assist, but Williams dismissed the cost, indicating “I don’t care about the money. What I care about is Boomer.” Williams is a truck driver who travels with his dog, and he said that “He’s not a dog to me he’s a little human. My little human, and he’s my travelling companion.”

The lengths Williams has gone to secure Boomer just a week before Lost Dog Awareness Day probably do not surprise many other pet owners. Boomer is simply one of many pets granted a status that places them firmly alongside humans while illuminating the philosophical complexities of human and natural relationships, childhood, public health, and consumer culture. Boomer and his peers are distinctive if not unique material things quite unlike prosaic commodities, cast as anthropomorphized “family members” endowed with nearly all of the fundamental characteristics we associate with humans.

Pet cemeteries make a variety of claims for pets as family members with human attributes and kinship status, if not immortal souls. The appearance of photographs on pet grave markers came as early as 1935 at Hartsdale, but Stanley Brandes found that such images became much more common in about 1990, a pattern that Richard Chalfen has also noted in Japan. These images on grave markers seem to underscore pets’ increasingly firm status as anthropomorphized “family members.” Brandes argues that post-World War II markers tend to include many more kinship references: e.g., Brandes notes Hartland markers that refer to the deceased as the “Third Member of the Family”; “Beloved Member of Our Family”; and “All My Love/Until We Meet Again/Mommy.” Brandes makes a strong case that the increase in religious symbols on markers since the 1980’s also mirrors an increasingly prevalent belief that pets possess a religious essence if not souls, which does not seem to be part of the symbolism on most pet markers before World War II. In January, a retired Virginia police officer spoke in support of a state bill that would allow joint human/pet burials, invoking all of these themes of kinship and faith. He and his wife did not have children, and he told the Washington Post that “It was either adopting some human babies or adopting some doggie babies, and we chose the dogs. Our dogs are our family. We’re all created by God. And there’s no reason that we cannot be together at our final resting place.”

This marker identified Precious as “our baby” while it also notes the departed companion is now “In God’s Care” (image Adam Schweigert)

Approached alongside the everyday material needs of people, these expenses appear at best absurd and selfish, but the caricature of the indulgent wealthy pet owner risks ignoring the intense emotional investment people have in their relationship with pets; this is precisely the point made by Eddie Williams as he openly ignored the expense of finding Boomer. Pets are certainly a distinctive consumer good, but the legion of handmade dog houses and individual pet burials in American backyards reflects that mass marketed materiality has not determined how we view the material dimensions of pethood. However, pets are increasingly firmly situated in a consumer culture that stresses humans’ moral responsibility to their pets, a responsibility that extends to a host of commodities that are often cast as essential to a devoted “family member’s” life and death. The American Pet Products Association estimates that the moral responsibility to animal companions will produce $58.51 billion dollars in expenditures in 2014 (pet food, at $22.6 billion, is the largest of those expenses).

Pet’s Rest in Colma, California was established in 1947 (image cactusbones)

Eddie Williams’ heartbroken devotion to his poodle clearly is not unique or perhaps even unusual. While much of pethood appears governed or significantly shaped by consumer culture, there remains a genuine human devotion to animal companions that is reflected in the scores of tattered lost dog signs on American telephone poles. Clearly many pet owners see their animals as trusted companions for at least portions of their owners’ lives, and most have embraced the notion of family and approach their pets’ mortality with codes of dignity much like those we grant to people.

About me

I am a historical archaeologist who studies consumer culture, focusing on material consumption and the color line and the relationship between popular culture and contemporary materiality. I am a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); Docent in Historical Archaeology at the University of Oulu (Finland); Past-President of the Society for Historical Archaeology (2012-2013); and a cycling geek.